48 Greek Biology 



one stomach ; as man, the pig, the dog, the bear, the lion, the 

 wolf.' i 



A very famous example in the Aristotelian works anticipating 

 modern biological knowledge is afforded by his reference to the 

 mode of reproduction of the cephalopods. The Malacia such 

 as the octopus, the sepia, and the calamary, have sexual inter- 

 course all in the same way ; that is to say, they unite at the 

 mouth by an interlacing of their tentacles. When, then, the 

 octopus rests its so-called head against the ground and spreads 

 abroad its tentacles, the other sex fits into the outspreading 

 of these tentacles, and the two sexes then bring their suckers 

 into mutual connexion. Some assert that the male has a kind 

 of penis in one of his tentacles, the one in which are the largest 

 suckers ; and they further assert that the organ is tendinous 

 in character growing attached right up to the middle of the 

 tentacle, and that the latter enables it to enter the nostril or 

 funnel of the female.' 2 



The reproductive processes of the Cephalopods were un- 

 known to modern naturalists until the middle of the nineteenth 

 century. Before that time several observers had noted the 

 occasional presence of a peculiar parasite in the mantle cavity 

 of female cephalopods and had described its supposed structure 

 without tracing any relationship to the process of generation. 

 In 1851 it was first shown that this supposed parasite was the 

 arm of the male animal specially modified for reproductive 



1 Historia animalium^ ii. 17 j 507** 12. 



2 Historia animalium, v. 6 5 54i b i. The hectocotylization of the cepha- 

 lopod arm which is here recorded as an element in the reproductive process 

 of these animals is denied in the De generatione animalium, i. 15 ; 72O b 32, 

 where we read that ' the insertion of the arm of the male into the funnel of 

 the female ... is only for the sake of attachment, and it is not an organ 

 useful for generation, for it is outside the passage in the male and indeed 

 outside the body of the male altogether.' Yet even here Aristotle knows 

 of the physical relationship of the arm. See note on this point in the trans- 

 lation of the passage by A. Platt, Oxford, 1910. 



